November 2, 2024
Needlessly On Minecraft
Minecraft is known as one of the largest creative outlets ever made, and none of its mascots, gameplay or soundtrack need any introduction. With that said, I find it is
also quietly one of the most mishandled popular games ever.
First off, I've gotta say this since no one else will - Mojang’s artificial “party atmosphere” surrounding even the most molecular feature add is beyond contrived at this
point. They parade about as if their new frog is downright OMG-AMAZING, with each release being dedicated all manner of animated videos and artwork to lure you back in to
the same buggy, incomplete game. You may even start to wonder if more effort went into the marketing than the patch!
Gasp!
But before we proceed, I'm going to isolate a feature add I remember in particular. Tridents were implemented in the mid-2010’s, I believe? And they STILL fly through
living beings without damaging them on the regular. Why? Because — Mojang is mysteriously invulnerable to criticism, thanks to their unique mix of one-way communication and
a ceaselessly extroverted “blonde” persona. It’s worth studying; you simply can’t name another limelight company who gets away with this quite the way they do.
Especially in survival mode, Minecraft is a really weird game when you stop to examine it as more than just a monolith. It’s a tech demo that never stopped being one. Most
mechanical or otherwise functional blocks propose solutions to problems that don’t actually exist anywhere in the game. They often don’t enable feel-good progression or
afford many new practical abilities, either. As for the world itself, it never really pushes back against the player, or interacts with them in a meaningful way. This
creates an extreme emphasis on open ended, player-driven decision-making, which is why it is so easy to grow bored after only a handful of hours. Despite this stagnancy,
Minecraft is constantly being updated, which means your greatest enemy is likely to be outside the game — backward compatibility. This further decreases play motivation by
fraying the thread of gameplay continuity and permanence, particularly for those wishing to engage in multiplayer with mods.
...which is almost everybody.
Most of Minecraft's content adds are designed to be feverishly peripheral to the core experience, never modifying anything too crucial in an already overly simple game.
That’s why you get weird shit like armadillo scutes, clay pottery and archaeologist brushes, which all have some esoteric tie to prehistoric creature eggs that lead the
player to an artifact...that changes the look of their shoulderpads.
What the fuck did I even just say? Why not instead flesh out existing NPCs, items, blocks, biomes and entire dimensions that have been patiently waiting to do not-nothing
for more than a decade?
MJ/M$ aren’t the first corporations to be afraid of their own golden eggs, but it comes across as if the rest of the world merely can't comprehend why their game is better
off unfinished. Add in the recent, intentional suppression of Bedrock Edition mods, and you start to wonder who the heck is steering that ship. And why.
I used to create railroads. I used to play with redstone signals. I'd lever-switch my cart from one railway onto another, and spend boatloads of time creating
a neat, organized storage system with hoppers, droppers and shulker boxes. USED to. But it occurred to me somewhere along the way, as it has for many — these features
aren't actually needed, or even helpful. It is more work to do these things than to shut up, mine, then leave. To another dev, this may communicate that "your
gameplay loop is fucked, and you should fix it", but Minecraft strategically avoids any and all depth (heh) or accountability by playing up the idea that it’s your
responsibility to imagine the game as something better, while censoring modders' efforts to actually fucking do that.
By now though, people are starting to see Minecraft’s supermassive vacuum for what it is: nothing to shoot for, no problems to solve, and not even a reason to
create for no reason. It’s empty, and no matter how many thumbnail-worthy “meme builds” you slave away at, we all know that at the end
of the day, there ought to be a whole lot more.